Rate of volunteerism and rate of children's volunteerism are two different statistics. I dunno if you meant something different in the last sentence, but just thought I'd be annoying and point it out.
Well, it's pretty silly to check what percentage of Congress is currently serving in Iraq, because they clearly have employment that precludes that. This stat is likely meant to address the usual cry of "why don't you send YOUR kids to war, then?" How many of those kids end up in combat arms would be interesting to know, to see if that matches or beats the general population too.
Dunno anything about that Ghandi guy, but Gandhi was successful because he was dealing with a group (the British imperial government) that didn't have any particular desire to hurt him or the members of his movement. They only wanted the people's voluntary cooperation with their onerous rule. In the face of opposition, they were forced to simply pull out because violence was the only option left. Had it been the Dutch in the 18th century rather than the Brits in the 20th, you better better believe Gandhi and his followers would've been been shot and dragged off immediately. The example of Gandhi is actually an example of how non-violence only works if your foe is sufficiently civilized, and that had more to do with the fact that it was the 1940's than anything else. What do you think would've happened if Gandhi had tried that in 1840? You really think the brits would've said "oh, well sorry, old chap; we'll just run along then"?
Totally fucking irrelevant. From the article: "The filtered air supply is known as the "bleed air." Evidence reveals that in some aircraft with poor engine design, leaky seals or a poor maintenance record, this air can become contaminated with fumes from the jet engines."
Like I stated originally, the air isn't recirculated in the plane, it comes in compressed form from the engines. Unless the terrorists have access to the engines in-flight (!), they can't get their chlorine bomb fumes into the cockpit from the passenger cabin. Care to bring up pilots who forget to bathe and asphyxiate on their own stink? It's just as relevant.
"Flamebait"? What moron mod rated the above "flamebait"? Illustrating the absurdity of complex mandatory safety devices is not flamebait, you fucktard. Flamebait is a message intended to provoke an angry opposing response. The only response I got was a single reply to the effect of "right on!" If you're a damn safety nazi and take offense at my characterization of you, really you should have opted for the classic "-1, overrated". Idiot.
(this message might qualify as flamebait, though it is more like a "troll")
especially in a closed, delicate system. Like an airplane in flight.
The inside of an aircraft isn't a closed system. The engines compress outside air and feed it in at the front of the plane. At the rear of the plane are pressure-valved exhaust vents. It's needlessly expensive to recycle the inside air when the outide air only needs to be compressed to 10psi to make it breatheable. A chlorine bomb would probably injure a few passengers right around it, but that's it. Being that the cockpit is "first in line" and gets its air straight off the bleed air system, there's no way to gas the crew.
This is bad for those of us living in the South because "coke" (lowercase) has come to mean "whichever black soft drink you serve" even though I really only want Coke.
Sometimes it's even worse than that. My boss, who's from Alabama somewhere, calls anything sugary in a can or bottle a "coke". This causes much consternation at the snack shop with the self-serve drink cooler when he says "I'll have a ham sandwich and a coke", and then after he pays, he grabs a $1.50 bottle Sobe tea rather than the 75 cent can of soda he paid for. Really the problem is two fold: his southern definition of "coke", and his thick-headed obliviousness to the notion that a 24oz of beverage probably costs more than a 12oz. No amount of pointing this out to him helps. Every time he orders he says "coke" and I tell the lady "he means a Sobe tea".
Moral: Buy a real saw today, because tomorrow the government will be outlawing the ones that actually work.
It's not like it's a high tech bit of safety equipment, like a speed limiter programmed into a car's ECU. Surely it'll be easy enough to disable. A saw is a motor driving a blade. Just remove any piece of equipment that isn't part of that relationship, and you've got a real saw again.
Marvelous. We certainly do need more mandatory complexity. Really we shouldn't stop at skin sensors on saws. We need breathalyzers on every car ignition, a licensing and permit structure (with fees of course) for posession of a baseball bat, and locking safes in every bathroom to keep pills away from children. Because those of us who don't drink, who only play baseball with our bats, and don't have any children should be willing to bend over and take it in the form of great cumulative expense and inconvenience for the sake of the statistically small number that would benefit. Like the safety nazis sa, "if it saves only one life, it's worth it!"
I know everybody is going to complain that their personal favorite is missing, but I can't believe that NeXT isn't on the list. I think it was one of the most influential systems of the last twenty years. In addition to all the innovations with graphics, removable storage, onboard DSP, drag and drop e-mail attachments, object-oriented framework, etc., the first web browser was developed on a NeXT.
Yeah, because NeXT took the world by storm, driving both Apple and IBM to bankruptcy in a matter of months. So popular did NeXT machines become that Microsoft quit the software business and started making beanbag chairs and pet rocks, because everybody who was anybody cast aside their PCs and Macs and went NeXT.
See, if we go by the benchmark of "OS features", then we're stuck considering all kinds of underperforming and/or ill-marketed dogs that knew a couple neat tricks, like the Xerox Altair. Of course, this list is so ridiculous (has some 2006 Toshiba no one's heard of, but omits the C-64?) that it doesn't actually matter.
If they wanted to glorify Commodore in this list, a better representation might have been the Pet. That was probably the pinnacle of Commodore's technological achievements.
Nah, the pinnacle was clearly the 64. The PET didn't do anything.
Whiney Mac Fanboy is an emotional troll. Avoid talking to him, he is all vitriol and zero substance when it come down to it and as his history bears out.
One could say the same thing about "Anonymous Coward" as well, chickenshit.
"Eventually her kid owns up to file sharing"
when did the parent become not responsible for what their kids do?
In general, children are responsible for their own actions, but parents are liable for the result of those actions.
[Obligatory Car Analogy]
If (say) an 11 year old child steals a car wrecks it, the child is the only one who can be charged with car theft, but the parents are the ones sued for damage to the car. The problem with the RIAA case here is that they claimed the parent "stole the car", as it were.
Not quite true. The safety regulations for DC voltages over 50V are quite onerous in the U.K. at least. You have to treat it as though it where mains.
So you're saying 1870's Bell engineers (in the United States) chose 48v because of UK regulations that probably did not exist at the time?
Therefore 48V is the largest DC voltage that is simple to work with that can be generated from lead acid cells wired in series.
Lead-acid batteries generate approximately 1.5v per cell. There's nothing that says you can't run 49.5v, or 46.5v. The choosing of 48v had not a damn thing to do with safety regs (such as they were in 1876!), but rather is probably arbitrarily based on 6 and 12 volt batteries being what were available, and 4 or 8 of them being right around what they needed power-wise. You have to remember that this was the 19th century. There weren't many rules about electricity back then.
48VDC is used by the Telcos for a multitude of reasons, efficiencey isn't one of them.
They use DC because the systems originally ran completely off batteries. The battteries were charged fomr battery chargers on the power line. One of the reasons they did that was so the phones would keep working during a power outage. The original UPS.
Indeed. Also, it should be noted that the basic functional design of the analog loop phone system has not really changed since 1876. The 48v system has more to do with 130 years of complete backwards compatibility than anything else. To this day you can still wire up an original 19th century Bell phone to your jack and carry on a conversation with a caller. You'll probably have to shout, like in the old days, but it'll still work.
DC will kill you much quicker than AC of the same voltage/amperage. .
I always thought the opposite was true. Here is a wiki quote that also supports that:
Low frequency (50 - 60 Hz) AC currents can be more dangerous than similar levels of DC current since the alternating fluctuations can cause the heart to lose coordination, inducing ventricular fibrillation,...
The difference is actually pretty irrelevant. A heart with sufficient current flowing through it will not be able to beat effectively regardless of whether it's AC or DC. There's a breakpoint below which the only ill effects would be from the disruptive action of an AC sine wave, but 380v is well beyond it!
but it would seem to make more sense to feed those with 3-phase AC and use a more sensible VDC delivery at, say, 48V, which is a telco standard
Except that the only reason you see 48vdc for telephone over those tiny 22ga wires is that there's no load. As soon as you go off hook the voltage drops to around 10vdc. This works because telephone circuits don't actually do much work-- they mostly just transmit analog data. The size of the copper you'd need to feed an actual load at 48vdc is prohibitive, particularly now with the price of copper going through the roof.
I didn't actually believe that grunts had it easier. It was just the implication that an 80 pound load was an insurmountably big problem even with shoulder straps. Thanks for posting appropriate detail.
I never claimed it was "insurmountable". I only said that "manportable" is a dirty word; a word that leads to infantrymen being loaded down like pack animals with almost their own weight in crap, when a reasonable operational load is commonly agreed to be 1/3 one's own body weight.
I've always wondered what it is about being an archaeologist that makes it OK to be a grave robber. I mean, the practice is frowned upon in pretty much every other circumstance.
Eighty pounds?
Roofers carry 80 to 100 pound bundles of shingles up ladders all day in all weather conditions the whole year round. There are no shoulder straps.
This (80mm mortar base + 3 mortar rounds) is 80lbs in addition to your normal combat load of 25lb pack, 7.5lb rifle, 4lb helmet, 12lb body armor vest, and 5lbs rifle ammo and miscellaneous gear. This is for several miles over the kind of terrain where you WISH for a ladder, also in all kinds of weather, with nothing to look forward to at the end of the day but a cold MRE and a wet sleeping bag. Seriously, there isn't a tradesman in this country who can legitimately claim to have to work harder than an infantry grunt. You hear plenty of them talking big, but no one who's ever done both says the life of a grunt is easier. My first job out of the Army was hauling 60lb bundles of electrical conduit up ladders in the Las Vegas summer. It's a walk in the park compared to a training exercise at Ft Irwin.
Now all they need is a handle to make it portable.:P
Seeing as how it's funded by the US Army, they'll probably strap it to a pack frame so it can be carried on a soldier's back and call it "manportable". Speaking as an infantryman myself, I can tell you that "manportable" is one of the dirtiest cursewords there is, as it's always very nearly a lie.
"Here, you carry this."
"It weighs EIGHTY POUNDS!"
"But it has shoulder straps, see?"
I don't understand. It seems to me that on a time scale of weeks, there are far more simultaneous actions. When your army is doing something, so is mine. If my scouts see your army moving to my base, I don't wait my turn to begin fortifying.
OK, let me put it slightly differently. On larger time scales, simultaneous action is absorbed within the larger abstraction. When you "pull back your focus" and work with (say) major operations within a battle, then it pretty much does start looking like "both sides taking turns". Take the Battle of the Bulge:
(turn 1, German)
Dec 16-17 Germans attack at three points, Allied units defend; Germans paradrop into the Ardennes forest; Village of Stavelot taken; Allies hold a St Vith
(turn 1, Allied)
Dec 18-19 US Army engineers destroy key bridges, cutting off Kampfgruppe Peiper from reinforcements. The cut off units are counterattacked and the village of Stavelot is retaken
(turn 2, Germans)
Dec 20-21 Germans finally break the flanks of the defenders at St Vith (4 days behind schedule), Allied defenders retreat west of the Salm river; repeated attack on the 101st Airborne at Bastogne are repulsed
(turn 2, Allies)
Dec 23-26 Allied bombing raids inflict heavy damage on the German rear; Patton's 3rd Army breaks through and relieves besieged 101st AB troops at Bastogne
(turn 3, Germans)
Jan 1 Germans make one final offensive on the 7th Army
So, what level of privacy can police reasonably expect? Consensus seems to be that on duty police officers, when in earshot, have no right to private conversations. What about their radio transmissions? Should decoders be legal?
"Decoders" are legal. However, figuring out the keys to an encrypted radio transmission is difficult enough to make that irrelevant. Mundane police radio transmissions should be recorded and released to the public on a weekly basis. Radio communications regarding ongoing investigations of a more sensitive nature should be kept confidential until they're judged to be no longer sensitive-- judgement to be made by an independent review board, NOT by the police department.
See, you can come up with all sorts of contrived examples, but the rule ought to always be: Government shall remain as transparent as possible. Government (and the agents thereof while in the course of executing their duties) should absolutely not be treated the "same [as] everyone". They aren't the same-- they're specifically a target for many restraints codified in law (peruse the constitution).
Yes, but no one takes turns, which I find to be extremely ridiculous.
Turn-based is only ridiculous in a tactical game, where simultaneous action is a necessity for decent relism. When you're operating at the strategic level, the "turns" cover such a long time period that it's no longer unrealistic. There are no "simultaneous" actions on a time scale of weeks. Attack, retreat, counterattack, etc.
And, at least in modern times, Generals know what is happening as it happens and can often change things.
Only in the last few years has it become possible to "micromanage" troops to any significant degree. And even then, no general is capable of issuing detailed orders to a thousand individual platoons. A "quick decision" at that level is usually little more than passing an order of "get 3rd brigade higher up on the left flank" and waiting two hours to see if worked. A general who is still issuing extensive detailed orders in the middle of a pitched battle is an idiot. This is the whole point of strategic and logistical planning. Everything's figured out beforehand. Battles are won by advance planning, not by a general shouting "take that bridge!" into a field telephone.
Hello, Dun Malg. This is my friend Civilization 4. CIV, meat Dun Malg.
I'll start playing Civ4 again as soon as someone finds a way to make the map grid diagonal (a la Civ3) and makes a mod that brings back the plantations/trading posts thing so you don't necessarily need to establish a city to get a resource.
Slashdot Mirror
Dunno anything about that Ghandi guy, but Gandhi was successful because he was dealing with a group (the British imperial government) that didn't have any particular desire to hurt him or the members of his movement. They only wanted the people's voluntary cooperation with their onerous rule. In the face of opposition, they were forced to simply pull out because violence was the only option left. Had it been the Dutch in the 18th century rather than the Brits in the 20th, you better better believe Gandhi and his followers would've been been shot and dragged off immediately. The example of Gandhi is actually an example of how non-violence only works if your foe is sufficiently civilized, and that had more to do with the fact that it was the 1940's than anything else. What do you think would've happened if Gandhi had tried that in 1840? You really think the brits would've said "oh, well sorry, old chap; we'll just run along then"?
Like I stated originally, the air isn't recirculated in the plane, it comes in compressed form from the engines. Unless the terrorists have access to the engines in-flight (!), they can't get their chlorine bomb fumes into the cockpit from the passenger cabin. Care to bring up pilots who forget to bathe and asphyxiate on their own stink? It's just as relevant.
Please try to follow the discussion.
"Flamebait"? What moron mod rated the above "flamebait"? Illustrating the absurdity of complex mandatory safety devices is not flamebait, you fucktard. Flamebait is a message intended to provoke an angry opposing response. The only response I got was a single reply to the effect of "right on!" If you're a damn safety nazi and take offense at my characterization of you, really you should have opted for the classic "-1, overrated". Idiot.
(this message might qualify as flamebait, though it is more like a "troll")
Marvelous. We certainly do need more mandatory complexity. Really we shouldn't stop at skin sensors on saws. We need breathalyzers on every car ignition, a licensing and permit structure (with fees of course) for posession of a baseball bat, and locking safes in every bathroom to keep pills away from children. Because those of us who don't drink, who only play baseball with our bats, and don't have any children should be willing to bend over and take it in the form of great cumulative expense and inconvenience for the sake of the statistically small number that would benefit. Like the safety nazis sa, "if it saves only one life, it's worth it!"
See, if we go by the benchmark of "OS features", then we're stuck considering all kinds of underperforming and/or ill-marketed dogs that knew a couple neat tricks, like the Xerox Altair. Of course, this list is so ridiculous (has some 2006 Toshiba no one's heard of, but omits the C-64?) that it doesn't actually matter.
[Obligatory Car Analogy]
If (say) an 11 year old child steals a car wrecks it, the child is the only one who can be charged with car theft, but the parents are the ones sued for damage to the car. The problem with the RIAA case here is that they claimed the parent "stole the car", as it were.
Lead-acid batteries generate approximately 1.5v per cell. There's nothing that says you can't run 49.5v, or 46.5v. The choosing of 48v had not a damn thing to do with safety regs (such as they were in 1876!), but rather is probably arbitrarily based on 6 and 12 volt batteries being what were available, and 4 or 8 of them being right around what they needed power-wise. You have to remember that this was the 19th century. There weren't many rules about electricity back then.
I've always wondered what it is about being an archaeologist that makes it OK to be a grave robber. I mean, the practice is frowned upon in pretty much every other circumstance.
"Here, you carry this."
"It weighs EIGHTY POUNDS!"
"But it has shoulder straps, see?"
(turn 1, German)
Dec 16-17 Germans attack at three points, Allied units defend; Germans paradrop into the Ardennes forest; Village of Stavelot taken; Allies hold a St Vith
(turn 1, Allied)
Dec 18-19 US Army engineers destroy key bridges, cutting off Kampfgruppe Peiper from reinforcements. The cut off units are counterattacked and the village of Stavelot is retaken
(turn 2, Germans)
Dec 20-21 Germans finally break the flanks of the defenders at St Vith (4 days behind schedule), Allied defenders retreat west of the Salm river; repeated attack on the 101st Airborne at Bastogne are repulsed
(turn 2, Allies)
Dec 23-26 Allied bombing raids inflict heavy damage on the German rear; Patton's 3rd Army breaks through and relieves besieged 101st AB troops at Bastogne
(turn 3, Germans)
Jan 1 Germans make one final offensive on the 7th Army
etc.
See, you can come up with all sorts of contrived examples, but the rule ought to always be: Government shall remain as transparent as possible. Government (and the agents thereof while in the course of executing their duties) should absolutely not be treated the "same [as] everyone". They aren't the same-- they're specifically a target for many restraints codified in law (peruse the constitution).
Only in the last few years has it become possible to "micromanage" troops to any significant degree. And even then, no general is capable of issuing detailed orders to a thousand individual platoons. A "quick decision" at that level is usually little more than passing an order of "get 3rd brigade higher up on the left flank" and waiting two hours to see if worked. A general who is still issuing extensive detailed orders in the middle of a pitched battle is an idiot. This is the whole point of strategic and logistical planning. Everything's figured out beforehand. Battles are won by advance planning, not by a general shouting "take that bridge!" into a field telephone.